Dammit, I am fed up with embargos!

[Doclector]

So, official playstation magazine has unleashed a stream of concentrated hate upon Alice madness returns. Fine. They have their opinion.

But where the hell are the other reviews? See, I simply don't trust official magazines, as far as I know, they all belong to future publishing now, and when I was an avid reader of official nintendo magazine, when they were taken over by future, things went down hill rather fast and I ended up only reading it for exclusive previews and news, before dropping the subscription altogether in favour of empire magazine.

It seems these days, if the review isn't held off until after release, it's only given to one or few reviewers. Sure, reviews are about as trustworthy as nick clegg wearing a tf2 spy costume, but if reviews mostly say it's good, or mostly say it's bad, you can get an idea of whether you may be wasting money or not, or at least find out if the game has any real technical issues.

I've had enough of this. With pre order bonuses and online codes, there has never been more pressure to get games on day one. The embargoes placed on reviews, this makes a frustrating situation for gamers, and I feel it needs to stop.

So what's your opinion on these things? Harmless, or endlessly annoying? Do you even rely on reviews that much?

 

[Zeh Don]

To be frank, I really dislike them because they're mostly used as a method to ensure pre-release hype equals sales on simply bad or over-priced games.

One editorial in GameInformer attempted to make the case that embargos help protect game developers from the "7 and below" review score backlash, and used Homefront as it's example. Basically, it stated that Homefront should have sold better, and things like Metacritic worked against the game. It went as far as to say that _all_ reviews should be postponed for two or three full days until _after_ the game's release, to allow it to accumulate more sales.
To me, that's basically saying "silence opinions so bad games sell more."

Embargos are used to mostly allow timed exclusives - the 'Offical Xbox Magazine' getting the world's first review for Halo 3, for example - however, in recent times its more about getting gamers to pony up money for bad games, safe in the knowledge that the DRM Software or Online Codes will prevent unsatisfied customers from getting their money back.

 

[Doclector]

To be frank, I really dislike them because they're mostly used as a method to ensure pre-release hype equals sales on simply bad or over-priced games.

One editorial in GameInformer attempted to make the case that embargos help protect game developers from the "7 and below" review score backlash, and used Homefront as it's example. Basically, it stated that Homefront should have sold better, and things like Metacritic worked against the game. It went as far as to say that _all_ reviews should be postponed for two or three full days until _after_ the game's release, to allow it to accumulate more sales.
To me, that's basically saying "silence opinions so bad games sell more."

Embargos are used to mostly allow timed exclusives - the 'Offical Xbox Magazine' getting the world's first review for Halo 3, for example - however, in recent times its more about getting gamers to pony up money for bad games, safe in the knowledge that the DRM Software or Online Codes will prevent unsatisfied customers from getting their money back.

See, it makes sense (almost) in the case of official magazines getting first review of games exclusive to and released by the relevant company, I get it, you give your own magazine the exclusive, it's still dickish, but it at least makes sense!

Aside from those cases, I think it puts more people off than negative reviews, I mean I was completely bought in to Alice madness returns, but if I can't get some more trustworthy reviews, I'm just gonna get duke nukem forever, because I've had it with blindly walking into purchases, and at least I get a demo with duke.